Yash Agarwal > Yash's Quotes

“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion”
― Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit." Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. "Can you believe our luck?" Max said. "We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!"
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had hey just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.)
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate, anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“I like revisiting, at certain times, spots where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.”
― Elif Şafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall